Self-same songs : autobiographical performances and reflections / Roger J. Porter.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Porter, Roger J., 1936-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Autobiography.
• Autobiography--Authorship.
• Report writing.

Physical Description:

xx, 272 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2002]

Summary:

A cyclone inexorably sweeps Eliette into her past in this novel about the wayward violence of love and nature in Guadeloupe. In Macadam Dreams the celebrated creoliste writer Gisele Pineau cunningly unveils the two cataclysms that have devastated Eliette's life: first, the cyclone of 1928, when she was only eight years old, and now Hurricane Hugo, whose destruction shatters the elaborate defenses the old woman has built around the sorrows and madness of her life in the small, accursed town of Savane Mulet. As Hugo unleashes its fury, a final blow frees Eliette's repressed memories of madness, isolation, loss, and of the grievous failure of a prophecy that promised her a child. A story of self-discovery, Macadam Dream speaks eloquently of the violence and poverty endured by women of this island nation--violence every bit as devastating, and seemingly inescapable, as the perpetually returning cyclone. Viewed by many as a canonical author in the Creole movement in Francophone literature, Pineau has created an extraordinary work that is recognized as a masterpiece of French-Caribbean literature.

Contents:

• Introduction: Intentions and Confessions xi
• Autobiography and Exile
• 1. The Singer in the Song: Autobiography in The Odyssey 3
• 2. The Pleasures of Nostos: Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory 17
• Autobiography as Defense
• 3. Filling Up the Silent Vacancy: Edward Gibbon's Autobiography 37
• 4. Unspeakable Practices, Writable Acts: Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography 54
• 5. The Sorrows of Autobiography: Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up 67
• 6. Redemptive Evasions: Edwin Muir's The Story and the Fable 81
• Autobiography as Self-Effacement
• 7. Autobiographical Writing as Death Weapon: Thomas Bernhard's Gathering Evidence and Franz Kafka's Letter to His Father 99
• 8. Figuration and Disfigurement: Herculin Barbin's Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite 117
• 9. Annulled Selves: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's An Accidental Autobiography and Michel Leiris's Biffures 131
• Autobiographical Posturing
• 10. Romantic Posing: The Life and Death Writing of Benjamin Robert Haydon 149
• 11. "A Serpent in the Coils of a Pythoness": Self-Dramatization in Eugene Delacroix's Journal 166
• Self as Other, the Other as Self
• 12. Conflict and Incorporation: Edmund Gosse's Father and Son 183
• 13. My Mother and Myself: Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh 201
• 14. Self and Other Is One Flesh: Double Voicing in Nathalie Sarraute's Childhood, Ronald Fraser's In Search of a Past, and Howard and Arthur Waskow's Becoming Brothers 215
• Epilogue: Unearthing the Father 233.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [247]-258) and index.

OCLC:

47805080